Country Specific Domains

Did you know that every country in the world has its own domain extension? This is by design so that businesses can be allocated to people in the right country and search engines like Google can serve up the correct results. This is all fine and dandy as long as you don’t get mixed up and pick the wrong country extension thinking it means something else.

I came across this recently when a website that was related to technology consulting had chosen the .it domain extension. It was their understanding that the .it domain extension was related to technology and therefore it was a good choice for there website URL, however it is actually the extension for the country Italy! And, because it is the extension for Italy, it was not able to rank in the United States for this business where the business is located at.

The Google search console kept bringing up no indexed results in the U.S. They even brought in other experts to check out the situation and they couldn’t figure out why the website would not rank at all. Upon investigation I discovered that they were using the .it extension, which is only for Italy. This means outside of Italy no searches are really going to pull the site up unless the person is specifically looking for this type of technology consulting in Italy.

What I did was recommend that they switch over to a .io extension which stands for Indian Ocean but has been well known in the tech industry to be the main choice for development. This will allow the business to have a really nice extension that ranks well and get the key words in their domain they want.

Obviously it would be better to have a .com which are always the best, but if you can’t get that and you looking for something specific like for the tech industry for example, it would be good to get a demain like a .io

Of course, many countries have different extensions like China’s is .cn and India’s is .in and so forth. It’s important not to use these domains just because you like what they look like or because you can make a word out of the domain if you’re not actually doing business in those countries. It will be very detrimental to the success of the website if you are trying to rank in the United States when your website says Italy, for example.

So make sure you choose a generic domain at the top level such as .com, .co, .org, .net, etc. These all are universal across the world. Whereas for Russia, for example, is .ru and you would not want to pick that when trying to rank anywhere else in the world.

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Written by: Jophiel Silvestrone

Jophiel Silvestrone has written 161 posts in the Tech Blog.

Jophiel grew up on a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana near Chico Hot Springs. Working on the ranch instilled work ethic and self motivation. Filled with this drive, Jophiel started mowing the local school's yards twice a month throughout the summers, at the age of 12.
He moved to Billings in 2004, where he has been deeply involved in the local business community ever since. A serial entrepreneur, Jophiel has ran multiple businesses in our local community. He now runs a web development company SkyPoint Studios. One of his favorite jobs though, is fathering his 11-year old son Jaoquin. "JJ" also loves technology.